Getty Images, one of the loudest critics of how AI companies source visual content, is now an official image partner of ChatGPT.
Getty announced a display agreement with OpenAI that will bring its licensed visual content into ChatGPT. The financial terms were not disclosed. The deal covers display — meaning Getty images will surface inside ChatGPT in some form, though the source material does not specify whether that means search results, image generation, inline attribution, or some combination. What Getty is licensing here, and what OpenAI is paying for, remains undisclosed beyond that framing.
The partnership is hard to separate from Getty's litigation history. In 2023, Getty filed suit against Stability AI, alleging the company scraped millions of its images without a license to train its image-generation models — one of the most high-profile legal challenges to AI training data practices at the time. That case has not concluded. Signing a commercial deal with OpenAI while that lawsuit proceeds elsewhere underscores something the industry has been circling for a while: content owners are increasingly willing to litigate with one hand and negotiate with the other.
Getty is not the first rights holder to move from critic to partner — news publishers have followed a similar arc with AI companies. Whether these deals represent fair compensation or a quiet surrender is a question neither side has any incentive to answer clearly.